March 15, 2011
MySQL soundbites
Oracle announced MySQL enhancements, plus intentions to use MySQL to compete against Microsoft SQL Server. My thoughts, lightly edited from an instant message Q&A, include:
- Given how hard Oracle fought the antitrust authorities to keep MySQL around the time of the acquisition, we always knew they were serious about the business.
- We’ll know they’re even more serious if they buy MySQL enhancements such as Infobright, dbShards, or Schooner MySQL.
- Oracle-quality MySQL’s most obvious target is SQL Server.
- But if you’ve bought into the Windows stack, why not stay bought-in?
- MySQL vs. SQL Server competition is mainly about new applications; few users will actually switch.
- A lot of SaaS vendors use Oracle Standard Edition, and have some MySQL somewhere as well. They don’t want to pay up for Oracle Enterprise Edition or Exadata. Good MySQL could suit them.
- Mainly, I see the Short Request Processing market as being a battle between MySQL versions and NoSQL systems. (I’m a VoltDB pessimist.)
The last question was “Is there an easy shorthand to describe how Oracle DB is superior to MySQL even with these improvements?” My responses, again lightly edited, were:
- Security.
- Scalability on a single big SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) box.
- Support for more datatypes.
- Data warehousing features.
- Built-in analytics beyond SQL.
- Integrated with Exadata.
- There probably are a bunch more, but those are the first ones that come to mind.
- Various features are much more mature in Oracle than in MySQL.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Exadata, MySQL, NoSQL, Oracle, Software as a Service (SaaS)
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2 Responses to “MySQL soundbites”
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For me the biggest difference is MySQL has no hash joins. It was due to be in the last major release but after the Oracle acquisition, it silently disappeared from the enhancement list.
The result is that MySQL joins can not scale to any reasonable size.
[…] a 24 hour or so period, Daniel Abadi, Dmitriy Ryaboy and Randolph Pullen all remarked on MySQL’s lack of hash joins. (It relies on nested loops instead, which were […]